Today’s guest post is by Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D, author of Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals. You can read all about her at the end of the post. Here’s Heidi:

A good friend of mine, “Tom,” recently brought a product to his boss’s attention that would allow his company to take its social media efforts to a whole new level, and might significantly improve their image. It would be an industry first, and not entirely without risk, but with huge potential payoff.

After hearing his pitch, his boss asked, “Are any of our competitors using this?”

“No,” Tom replied, feeling that this was a strong selling point – a competitive edge.

“Well,” his boss responded, “then I don’t think we want to stick our necks out and be the first, do we?”

Huh?

Tom was disappointed, but not at all surprised. For every manager out there trying to encourage innovation, there seem to be ten standing squarely in the way of it. I spend a lot of time talking to people about motivation and growth, and everywhere I go, I hear complaints like:

I just can’t get my boss to take the risk.
There’s a huge opportunity here, and we’re missing it.
We just follow trends, we don’t ever create them.

It’s incredibly frustrating to know you have a real winner of an idea on your hands, something that could really shake things up, and not be able to get it past your Nervous Nelly of a boss. Not that the cautious, conservative approach doesn’t have its place – but ultimately an organization cannot grow without embracing some risk.

The recent recession has only made matters worse. People don’t want to rock the boat at a time when jobs are hard to find. Unfortunately, they forget that without organizational innovation and growth, no job is safe for long.

The problem, in a nutshell, is this: when they make decisions, many managers focus much more on what they have to lose than what they might gain.

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